GAME IMPROVEMENT
not improve the spin and launch consistency across the face. Spin and launch consistency across the face are functions of the face material that you’re using, where your centre of gravity is located, how you’ve engineered the curvature of the face, and MOI. It’s all those things working in concert with one another, not to mention, how the player delivers the club to the ball.” More importantly, perhaps, MOI is already pretty darn impressive with 95 percent of current driver designs, compared to what was available a decade ago. More MOI is always going to be better for your mis-hits, and as we’ve heard, probably your confidence, too. Golden makes the case for how years of Titleist research shows that even for the average golfer more than 70 percent of impacts occur within half an inch of centre. That’s much tighter than the kind of miss where an ultra-high MOI driver might help you more than a standard high MOI driver. In other words, these ultra-high MOI drivers are helping your absolute worst hits get somewhat better. You just might not hit it there all that often, even less so with a driver that has been custom-fit to you. A driver fitting can produce a lot of numbers on a launch-monitor screen, but one worth paying attention to is how often you are consistently delivering the clubhead square at impact. Obviously, that will show up in longer distance and tighter ball-flight dispersion, but it should also speak to how easy it is for you to make the same swing, the way Korda has been doing since the start of the year. Chris Marchini, the lead clubfitter at the Golf Digest Hot List summit, recently put it this way: “My advice is to go into a fitting totally agnostic. We see it at the Hot List Summit every year. We’re putting a club in someone’s hands that is far better optimised than what this player’s handicap, swing speed or skill level might suggest, but it ends up producing the best ball flight for them.” In other words, be open to possibilities. It has certainly worked for the two best players in the world.
For much of her career, though, she’s played drivers with a little bit of a draw bias like TaylorMade’s Stealth 2 HD or Titleist’s TSR1. It’s all about matching her with her desired shape (more clubhead volume towards the heel side) and her desired right-to-left ball flight, said TaylorMade’s Ryan Ressa, senior tour manager. “People perceive that it’s kind of an anti-slice club, but it’s really not,” he says. Ressa says that Korda wants to see the ball on a tee shot fall from right to left, maybe a five-metre draw. “That’s just the shot shape she prefers, so it’s hard, even if you find something that goes dead straight, it just doesn’t fit her eye,” he says. Aside from her custom shaft (Mitsubishi Diamana GT 60) and custom length (45.18 inches), Korda’s Qi10 Max is only slightly tweaked from the stock version. The rear perimeter weight is about six grams lighter than standard, which makes the driver’s overall MOI slightly less than 10 000, and the TPS sole weight is a little heavier to get the total weight of the head back to standard and give Korda a little more draw. It’s worth remembering again, however, that the measurement of a higher MOI that records a higher number is not necessarily the be-all and end-all for forgiveness. According to Chuck Golden, vice president of research and development for Titleist: “The first thing that people kind of forget about but need to realise is that MOI is not about distance gain; it’s about mitigating distance loss on off-centre hits. MOI does not guarantee a straight shot, and it does not make shots straighter, and it does The driver has become as individualised as the putter. No handicap level or swing speed eliminates considering any kind of driver.
speed eliminates considering almost any kind of driver. With dozens of models and multiple choices within the same brand, one of the things we stress during our Hot List player testing every year is this: Throw away your assumptions. Be prepared to be surprised. When we looked at how our high- swing-speed, low-handicap players at the Hot List fared with game- improvement drivers, we found some did well and others didn’t. For example, Josh Macera, a 1-handicap with a swing speed of 191 kilometres per hour, averaged four more metres with the game-improvement drivers compared to all others. Jack Bingham, another 1-handicap who plays a natural fade and swings 176 kph, enjoyed more ball speed with the high-forgiveness drivers, including 11 more metres on average with the draw- biased Ping G430 SFT. Conversely, Wesley Gilmore, a plus-1 handicap, hit the forgiving drivers almost 10 metres shorter with a spin rate on one model that was more than 30 percent higher than his average across all drivers. This tells us that the driver has become as individualised as the putter. Each player’s swing is going to find a driver with a particular shape and centre of gravity that makes his or her delivery more efficient, leading to a more explosive ball flight. This is what is called optimising performance. You cannot find the right driver by guessing or assuming that what has always been your go-to isn’t going to change. Korda has used TaylorMade’s Qi10 Max driver since the start of the season when she won the LPGA Drive-On Championship in January. That driver has a total forgiveness, or moment of inertia, of over 10 000, a measurement of stability in how much the head twists vertically or horizontally on a mis-hit. Less twisting means more energy is transferred to the ball at impact. For perspective, according to TaylorMade, a 10 000 total MOI is about 40 percent higher than what TaylorMade drivers were a decade ago. “I look down and know I can hit any shot I want with it,” Korda says.
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 95
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2024
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